Everyone knows Newton’s First Law of Motion: An object at rest will stay at rest until moved by an external force. The same is true with products.

I’ve been a Product Manager for about 15 years, working in a variety of markets, and primarily focused on B2B or niche B2C products and platforms. And the one thing that seems to be consistent is that once a product comes to rest, it takes an incredible feat of will to get it moving again.

Take, for example, your typical B2B solution — originally build 4–5 years ago to solve a specific problem for a specific set of users and use cases. Then, as a victim of its own success, additional capabilities were bolted on as needed, guided likely by nothing more than the vision of the CEO and the requests of the company’s biggest customers. Little attention paid to general marketability of the solution, and even less paid to the user experience — at least at the end user level.

After 5 years, the product is moderately successful, but has come to rest — the prospects keep buying it, and the customers keep using it. But what’s hiding underneath all that success is a cancer. Because the product has come to rest, it will stagnate quickly, fall behind technologically, and become prey to the next up-and-comer who sees the opportunity in solving the same set of problems with more finesse and likely with more private funding.

The solution here is ostensibly an easy one, though in practice it seems too difficult for many companies to grok — don’t let your product come to rest. Stay innovative, stay creative, stay on the edge of what your customers need, and not responsive to what they say they want.

Recall that the corollary to objects at rest staying at rest is that objects in motion tend to stay in motion — make sure your product is always moving, always growing, always adapting to the world around it. Or someone else will.

A common question that people pose when they are considering whether to pursue a career in Product Management is whether or not they should get an MBA, or at the very least obtain a certificate of some form from any of the numerous companies and institutions out there who are offering such a document.

Almost universally, the answer is no — having an MBA doesn’t make you a more attractive PM candidate, nor does obtaining a “certificate” from nearly any source out there.

One of the most important parts of being a Product Manager is becoming an agent of change in your organization. Unless by some absolute miracle you’re working for a company that has everything figured out, has no conflicts at all, and is able to go from theory to strategy to tactics to release smoothly every single time, you will need to learn to spearhead change in your organization.

And being an agent of change is a scary thing – you’re asking people to follow you into the unknown, to take your research and your knowledge and your experience as the stepping stones to a better future. You’re putting your personal and professional reputation on the line, in the hope that the light that you see at the end of the tunnel is not a train heading in your direction.

It’s scary — but it’s also what separates a great Product Manager from merely a good one.

There seems to be a strong bias in many large companies toward assessing a product manager’s ability to perform based as much (if not more) on their technical ability, background, and knowledge as their real-world, market, and user experience. To me, this is an entirely backward way of approaching the problem, as the entire purpose of having a strong product manager is not to provide an additional technical resource to determine the “how”, but to provide a strong and knowledgeable resource that can accurately describe the “what” and the “why” of the problems that your product should be solving.

This means that someone who brings a lot of knowledge and ability to the table, but who lacks certain “check the box” background skills in the technical realm may be at a disadvantage. Here are some tips and tricks that someone coming from a non-technical background can use to excel as a Product Manager in nearly any company.

If you’re like most Product Managers, you find yourself constantly struggling to manage incoming priorities, especially when there are problems that directly impact your clients, customers, and ongoing plans. It’s way too easy to wind up getting caught up in the constant firefighting efforts that happen on a day-to-day basis, and extricating yourself from the constant miasma of yelling, screaming, hair-pulling, and general chaos can often seem impossible.

There are some very simple things that you can do, starting immediately, that can help you to build a more rigorous and structured approach to these issues, and that can pull you out of the constant firefighting that you’re facing on a daily basis.

I know, we’ve all been in a “brainstorming” session which devolves into either a pointless series of discussions that never goes anywhere, or which are code for “let the executives speak, and follow their lead.” The simple fact is that most people aren’t trained to work in a true brainstorming fashion, and that most businesses don’t invest in the right kind of thoughtful facilitation that’s necessary to have effective brainstorming sessions.

But that’s not to say that it can’t be done, and that there aren’t proven and reliable ways to create an engaging and productive brainstorming session. Through my work as a Product Manager and Product Owner, I’ve worked with teams who fully embraced the principles of Agile development — and, surprisingly enough, there’s a lot of commonality to be found in empowering a team to be self-directed and working with stakeholders to brainstorm new ideas. To wit, I provide you with the following framework for effective and productive brainstorming sessions.